Child’s eye views

Even without including the ubiquitous interest in myopia management, it is fair to say that a key area of discussion at the American Academy of Optometry event held last month was paediatric optometry. This article aims to summarise some of the more important lectures and presentations aimed at improving eye sight in children, along with some other developments that caught my eye.

Paediatrics

A key topic of discussion this year was the management of convergence insufficiency. According to one of the lectures, convergence insufficiency (CI) is ‘the most common binocular disorder with a prevalence of between 2.3% and 7.7% in the general population. As well as the more familiar problems of asthenopia with near work, something known to have impact upon a child’s educational progress, CI has also been found to influence the likelihood of a whole host of other diagnoses. Take attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for example. ADHD has been found to have three times the incidence among patients with CI, and, conversely, there is three times the incidence of CI in the ADHD population.